Discontinuous Reception (DRX) is a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard in Long Term Evolution (LTE) to save battery in a user equipment (UE) such as a mobile phone, tablet, media player, laptop, etc., or any other appropriate mobile terminal with communication capability. DRX is a parameterized functionality that effects how the UE switches between ON and OFF reception states. DRX parameters are known to both the UE and the Radio Access Network (RAN), e.g., the eNodeB, the NodeB, or the Radio network Controller (RNC), with which the UE communicates. During the ON period, the UE is able to receive data packets. If no packet is received during the ON period, the UE switches to OFF after an inactivity timer has expired. During the OFF period, it is not possible to send data packets to the UE and packets have to be buffered in the eNodeB until the next ON period commences. When sending packets, the UE always transitions to the ON state. Numerous DRX settings are possible for best handling different types of data packet flows. Important performance characteristics for selecting DRX parameters are delay due to buffering in the eNodeB and battery saving in the UE.
Traffic shaping is a technique which delays some or all of the packets in a packet switched network, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) network, for the purpose of bringing the packets in compliance with a traffic profile. For example, if packets arrive with approximately fixed inter-arrival times, a traffic shaper could delay a group of packets and after some period of time send these as a burst of packets with virtually zero inter-arrival time. For resource utilization purposes, this strategy may be more efficient, for example for saving battery in the UE.
A problem in the art is how to evaluate the performance of a traffic shaper in terms of quality or “goodness” according to reasonably objective standards, for the purpose of finding an optimal or near optimal shaper under given traffic conditions. The quality of a particular traffic shaper may be quantified in a number of ways, where the most intuitive and straightforward measure is to quantify how much resource gain is achieved with the shaper without sacrificing quality of experience of the user. If the resource gain is higher with the shaper than without, it can be concluded that the particular shaper brings and added value. Although it can be determined whether the utilization of a particular shaper is better than not using a shaper at all for a certain traffic flow, it would also be desirable to be able to compare different shapers for finding the best one for the certain traffic flow.